


and i'll call you by mine

by rinnwrites



Series: Little Toy Guns (Bucky Barnes Bingo 2019) [5]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Fix-It of Sorts, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-30
Updated: 2019-07-30
Packaged: 2020-07-27 13:07:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20046526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rinnwrites/pseuds/rinnwrites
Summary: Bucky’s soul mark, like everyone’s, had appeared on the inside of his non-dominant wrist during puberty. The first initial of the one person in the world that would truly complete him, make him whole. It would burn, when he touched the right one for the first time, a white hot flash. Or It would have. His arm was cold metal, polished and blank. His mark was gone.and:Bucky Barnes Bingo - C5: JealousyWinteriron Week 2019 - Day 3: bed sharing, soulmates





	and i'll call you by mine

**Author's Note:**

> It's a little late but I'm still trying to power through WIW. We'll see how far I get by the collection close on Friday!
> 
> title from Call Me By Your Name

It’s smooth, his arm.

The metal is polished and strong, gleaming in the light, pristine, bright. Empty. 

The expanse of silver is broken up by only the grooves between plates and the star at his shoulder, now filled with enamel in navy to cover the red of old - it matched the color of his Commandos uniform, according to Steve. 

Even the scratches and dings had been cleaned up, filled in, buffed out. Stark had gone a little overboard about patching up his tech in the year since Bucky had pulled Steve out of the Potomac. Natasha had dragged them both to New York and Avengers tower, at a loss for who else to trust but Stark. It had been a whirlwind since then - a blur of fixing Bucky’s arm, fixing his brain (mending his soul), and ripping out HYDRA root and stem.

They’d settled into a new normal, or enough of one for Bucky to finally come to a startling realization: his soul mark was gone. 

It was one of the strongest ties to his old life, the Bucky Barnes who grew up in Brooklyn, who fell from the train, and one of the last memories to return to him. It was the letter A - not too unlike the bold logo that adorned the glass and metal skyscraper he now called home - heavy and no-nonsense, imposing, protective. 

Or it had been all of those things. 

Bucky’s soul mark, like everyone’s, had appeared on the inside of his non-dominant wrist during puberty. The first initial of the one person in the world that would truly complete him, make him whole. 

It had sat on his skin, full of promise each time he flirted with an Abigail, Anne, or Angela (Aaron, or Andrew too), waiting for the moment that their hands would brush, or he’d tuck a lock of hair behind their ear, only for the warmth of hope to ebb away as the contact resulted in…nothing. 

It would burn, when he touched the right one for the first time, a white hot flash.

It would have. 

His arm was cold metal, polished and blank. His mark was gone. 

The realization brought back a flood of other memories, and clarity. 

He remembered Steve, 95 pounds of pure spite, and the gentle curving S on his wrist, more like handwriting than text. They’d joked that Steve was his own soulmate, because there was no one in the world that could handle him. 

No one could temper that fire, sooth that anger at the world, no one was a  _ good enough guy. _

But Sam Wilson was. 

It was obvious now, the way they moved around each other, in the quinjet, in combat, in the kitchen at home - always brushing hands, covering each other’s backs, standing close enough to touch. Sam was Steve’s S.

How had he not noticed before? He’d known Steve was handling him with kid gloves but to keep from mentioning something like that??

Bucky found himself looking up from his arm and around at his team, Banner stood at the back of the quinjet, pacing nervously as he often did. His mark was intentionally covered, a piece of cloth wrapped around his wrist to obscure it - Bucky couldn’t tell what it was, or if it had darkened from faint grey to dark black, a sign that he’d found his soulmate. 

Natasha was up front with Barton, joking back and forth as the archer piloted them to their destination, a vibrant black L stood out on his wrist, a lazy looping script. Nat’s Widow suit covered most of her arms, but he could make out just the edge of a scar, a burn. Fire? Acid? Removing the mark was likely part of her training. Bucky wondered if she remembered what it said. 

That left Stark, who stood sentry-still near where Banner paced, already encased in the metal of his suit. Bucky could probably figure out what his mark read by ‘googling’ it, or asking the voice in the ceiling, but that felt a little taboo, he was trying to relearn boundaries - he couldn’t remember what etiquette was around the subject so he filed the thought away and turned his studying eyes towards Steve and Sam.

They sat on the opposite side of the quinjet, heads huddled close together as they spoke in murmurs, knees barely touching, and Bucky wondered again how he’d been so  _ blind _ . 

It was right there in the language of their bodies, the way they existed in orbit of one another, an almost tangible gravitational pull drawing them together. It was in the light in Steve’s eyes, something Bucky hadn’t seen since...before the war. It was in the soft smile on Sam’s face, like Steve was anything and everything he could have ever wanted. 

There was a pang of something foreign in his chest, of not getting the sweet he wanted when Becca had one, of seeing Johnny Davis show up to school in new shoes every year, of walking by a big sturdy brownstone on his way to the rickety apartment he shared with Steve…

It was jealousy. He was jealous...of Steve? Of Sam? Both?

The longer he looked at them, the more the longing in his chest grew, the discontent. They had  _ that _ , something incredible, unexplained by science or even faith. They had it and he didn’t. Maybe never would. 

“We’re at patrol point one, Stark, Barnes, this is your stop.” Clint’s voice echoed in the quiet of the quinjet and Bucky stood from his seat, grabbing a stealth chute from the equipment rack, before moving to take his place next to Stark.

The cargo door opened, cold wind whipping at his face and pulling at his hair. 

“Let’s do this, Freezy Pop.” The mechanized voice through the mask of the suit was the only warning Stark gave before he took off in a flash of red metal and blue light.

Bucky strapped into his chute pack and gave a little salute to Steve and Sam, “We’ll check in from the ground.” 

He didn’t wait for an answer before he took the last few steps out the back of the quinjet, greeted by the rush of wind in his ears and the ground below hurtling towards him. He aimed for a clearing, deployed his chute, and landed right in the middle of an ambush. 

*****

A seriously enhanced jamming signal and a shockingly well executed assault later, Bucky was beaten and bruised, but still in one piece - which was more than could be said for the Iron Man suit. 

Nothing in all of their research, all the files they’d unearthed at the Triskelion, or confiscated from high-level operatives had indicated that HYDRA was capable of this kind of assault. 

The fact that they’d been able to not only pinpoint the intended patrol area, but cut them off from the rest of the team, essentially incapacitate Iron Man and come dangerously close to reclaiming the Winter Soldier as an asset was frankly terrifying. 

It also had Bucky’s skin crawling in anticipation of a follow-up attack and a pit in his stomach at not knowing if they’d launched similar attacks on the rest of his team. 

“We need to get out of here, there’s a safehouse a few miles east.” 

Bucky was walking by the time he finished his sentence, wiping blood spatter from his face as he stepped over a motionless body, tugging a knife out of it as he went and slipping it back into his belt. 

“A safehouse? We don’t have any safehouses near here.” Stark answered, the frustration plain in his voice at being unable to access his AI.

“It’s not yours. It’s mine.”

Silence followed his claim. He didn’t turn around to see the shocked expression on Stark’s face at the news.

A few moments later he could hear Stark’s footsteps hurrying to catch up to him.

“Yours??”

*****

The ‘safehouse’, for all appearances, was just a small, rundown cottage in the woods. The front porch was partially collapsed, the windows were boarded up, the wood looked rotted in places. 

Tony was skeptical at best until he watched Barnes stomp through the mess of fallen branches and reach down into the underbrush. There was a cellar door, entirely concealed by the detritus on the ground, that opened to reveal a set of concrete stairs that led into darkness. 

Wishing he had at least the light of a repulsor charge to illuminate the way, Tony followed Barnes down and closed the cellar door behind him, plunging them into darkness.

A moment later came the tell-tale beeping of a soft-touch keypad - Barnes entering a security code - and the metallic thunk of the lock disengaging. A thick metal door swung open, the space within springing to life as they walked in. 

Lights flickered on overhead, bright fluorescents that washed the room with harsh light. It was a fallout shelter, built for no more than two people. A set of shelves against one wall was stocked with nonperishables, flanked by a dusty counter with a sink on one side and a rickety wooden table and chairs to the other. A yellowed curtain separated a shower and toilet from the main space, and a murphy bed was folded up against the wall. 

Sensing no immediate danger, Tony pulled the emergency release for his suit and stepped out, leaving it standing behind him like a beaten up statue to guard the door. Barnes keyed a code into the interior keypad and the lock engaged again. 

“What the hell, Barnes? How do you have access to this place?” Tony asked, taking a deep breath of the musty air no longer being filtered by his suit. 

Barnes had already started removing his gear and moved to the small sink to rinse the sweat and blood from his skin. He looked up at Tony with an uncomfortable look on his face.

“I, uh...the Soldier took it. From a target. Got the access codes from him.” He looked around the room and Tony could see the smallest shiver race through him, like he was reliving something uncomfortable. Tony knew the feeling. “The intel should have been reported to HYDRA but I was...they’d had me out for too long, I’d started to remember myself. Never told them about it.” He cut the water off, “I didn’t entirely understand then...there was just something telling me I needed to have somewhere safe to go. They...reprogrammed me right after.”

Tony took that information in for a moment, gazing at Barnes’s profile and trying to steer his thoughts away from  _ reprogramming _ . “It’s secure?” he asked, rather than prodding further into its history. He didn’t think he wanted to know what had happened here.

He got an affirmative grunt in response, “It can only be reopened from the inside, that’s the only entrance.”

“So how do we contact the team for extraction?” 

Barnes moved over to one of the metal wall panels and pushed down lightly, it popped open to reveal a room just as large as the first, filled wall to wall with old tech, mid-late Soviet Era, Tony would guess. 

“Was hoping you could answer that.”

*****

The next few hours were filled with Tony playing around with the tech, discovering the system, jerryrigging the receiver to transmit a signal and pulling scraps from his decommissioned armor to try to get something, anything out of their underground bunker to the team. 

While he worked, Barnes finished stripping off his gear and took what was surely a very cold shower behind that yellowed curtain. Tony dutifully averted his eyes from pale skin and scarred flesh and shiny metal, there were more important things to focus on. 

Tony barely looked up as Barnes reappeared at his side with a bowl of something he’d salvaged from the kitchenette, but he ate it quickly as he continued working. Finally, he emerged from the concealed tech room with a satisfied grin on his face, absently noticing that somehow Barnes was now dressed in sweatpants and a faded t-shirt. This bunker was better stocked than he’d thought...even if the tech was horribly outdated. Tony was an actual genius and had figured it out anyway.

“My signal reached the team,” he said triumphantly, “so...now we wait.” 

It was only then, eyes roving over Barnes’s face, that he saw the dark circles, the weariness in the lines of his face, and Tony realized how long he’d been awake, how long  _ they’d _ been awake.

As though reading his mind, Barnes moved to the murphy bed and pulled it out, allowing it to take up the bulk of the space in the room, scratchy looking sheets were stretched tightly across the mattress. Any other time, Tony might have turned up his nose but just the sight of a bed made his body feel heavier, his eyes bleary. 

Without thinking on it much further, Tony collapsed on one side of the bed, undersuit and all, ignoring the dried sweat on his skin and the musty smell of the mattress beneath him. He opened one eye at Barnes, watching him stand off to the side of the bed, looking jumpy. 

“Even you must be tired after the day we’ve had.” He insisted, propping his head on one arm to better pin Barnes with a Look. 

“I’ll keep watch.”

Tony rolled his eyes. “There’s only one entrance?”

“Yes.”

“You’re the only one with the codes?”

“...the only one alive.”

“So no one is coming in.”

“....no.”

“Then sleep.”

Barnes looked at him, then the empty side of the bed with uncertainty.

“Lay down on the damn bed, Barnes.”

Tony’s tone left no room for argument, but he was still a little surprised when Barnes acquiesced. He didn’t let himself wonder how much of that was a just an underlying propensity to follow orders. 

As Barnes settled beside him at a careful distance, Tony let his head fall back to the pillow, and sleep took over in an instant. 

Until he awoke to a searing pain, of course. 

His eyes flew open and he leapt from the bed in shock, wrenching his left sleeve back to reveal the source of the intense burning. His mark. 

In the years it remained pale, Tony had nearly forgotten it. Or...he’d tried his best to drink the thoughts of it away, to work himself into a stupor, to cover it with armor like he was protecting his heart. By now he’d stopped expecting to ever feel this, for it to burn to life. It stood out from his skin, hot to the touch and dark as night, the lone letter J, it’s crossbar jauntily tilted at the slightest angle. 

After the flash of pain subsided, realization washed over him and he looked up to Barnes, who had, of course, woken up at the commotion and was frozen in place, eyes locked on the newly darkened letter. 

“J...” he said softly, “for James?” There was a soft wonder in his eyes that hardly seemed to belong there as flesh fingers traveled to drag across smooth metal…where Barnes’s mark would have been.

Tony swallowed, a million thoughts racing through his mind, how could he have never noticed that Barnes’s mark was gone? How had they spent so much time around each other and only touched  _ now.  _ How could someone like Tony actually have a soulmate? How could they have managed to find each other despite the literal  _ lifetime _ between them?

The heat from his wrist had faded by the time he managed to speak again. “Yours…you had an A?”

Barnes closed his eyes, like he was looking at the image in a memory. “I just remembered it.” he laughed breathily, opening his eyes to look at Tony again, “spent my whole life...before, lookin’ for an Anne, or Andrew…” 

It was Barnes...Bucky? James. It was James that moved around the bed to come closer, but Tony’s left hand reached out almost of its own accord, like the mark wanted to be near him, like it longed for his touch. 

“James.” Tony said softly, even as James’s fingers pressed into the J at his wrist.

“Anthony.” James returned, and they shared a smile of awe and relief. 

“Fate, you shifty minx.” Tony muttered, laughing softly as he leaned up to press his lips to James’s in a kiss, the mark at his wrist pulsing with a comfortable warmth at the contact. 

Naturally, that was when the bunker’s alarm went off, alerting them to motion outside. The team was here, the spell broken. 

But the connection remained. 

Tony pulled away from James to silence the alarms, but he could feel the pull of the bond between them, a tether like he’d seen draw Ana to Jarvis, Rhodey to Pepper, one he’d never really believed in until he felt it. 

They abandoned the bunker and reunited with their team, not unable to hide their change in demeanor as they did…

They’d spend the next few weeks learning one another, building on what had sprouted with their touch.

And if Tony engraved an A into James’s next upgrade, well, who could blame him?


End file.
